two amazing women

Werdi Haziran 03, 2022

There are many art glass centers across the nation, studios that bring in visiting professional artists to teach, but until a few years ago there was no such place in Houston. Now, thanks to Bob Paterson, we have Hot Glass Houston.

We've taught a few classes there but better than that, he brings in some really great talent, friends who I rarely see, just so I can visit with them!

Not really.

He brings in really great talent to teach and share amazing techniques. I'm lucky enough to be able to ~~barge~~ drop in on their classes to see what they are doing (and how they do what they do) and visit with my friends who live out of state.

In the last month he has brought in two amazing glass artists, Catharine Newell and Linda Ethier.

Catharine paints these wonderful dimensional portraits of people and birds and landscapes by noodling colored glass powders around multiple layers of glass and fuses them together. Her images are so evocative, ethereal and filled with emotion. She just blows me away. And she is so serene herself. I'm lucky enough to have two of her earlier small 'notes'.

Linda is a caster like me. When we first met and got to know each other she was doing these wonderful thick castings with embedded figures and flowers and things. Then she did a lot of commission work. And then she didn't do anything at all for a while while she thought through and developed a completely new body of work that is so different from her previous work you would not know it was the same artist. While I really liked her work before, I adore her new direction. Maybe it's because we use a lot of the same things in our work...bones, sticks, leaves, egg shells, feathers.